"The best video game I played last year is a science-fiction thriller about alchemy, and it has no graphics or sound effects"

"Hadean Lands is a game of alchemy and exploration, with an intricate structure of interlinked puzzles. Every ritual you learn adds a new ability to your toolkit. But every ritual requires a different combination of ingredients, and some ingredients are in desperately short supply."

"Hadean Lands offers a highly consistent and fair puzzle system in which the basic rules of the universe never change, but where the player has to learn to think at a higher and higher level. At the outset, you’re worrying about how to get a single ingredient for a particular ritual. By the endgame, you’re thinking about how to chain together all the different rituals you know and how to manage scarce ingredients so that you can accomplish hard tasks before you need to reset."

If you have a significant other, or a child or parent that might be willing to join you for extended puzzle-solving, few experiences are as satisfying to team up on as a good text adventure..